How Do Postmodern Ideas Affect Culture?

How have post modernist ideas manifested in themselves in public policy and culture?

The question is like asking how did medieval ideas affect medieval society?

Rather, postmodernist ideas are reflections of the postmodern culture.

Take for instance Francois Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition. It was a description of what the postmodern era is. It was not a manifesto about why the culture should be postmodern – and it wasn’t an argument for “postmodernism,” as if to say we should all be postmodernists. Too late, the world is already this way. Postmodernism and the postmodernist theorists are not ‘advocating’ postmodernism as a theory for living or a set of ideas that one could derive a philosophic “system” from. They are more like prophets and seers describing a car crash as it is happening.

The theorists do not praise postmodernism. They denounce it. Postmodernism is the era of the virtual commodity, the culture of nihilism, artificial war, asymmetrical war, the sign economy, cynical data, apathy, the society of mass spectacles. Our metaphysics are completely virtual. We are profoundly bored, alienated. We are on a path toward annihilation. Human experience is reduced to commodification.

So, if the theorists have affected society with their ideas, it has only been to confuse people with the terms they use. (It seems mostly the Christians are chattering about the term “postmodernism” these days.) The left’s connection to postmodernity is fractured (as it would be) and divided over its neurotic tendencies to split off into tiny camps. The person on the street says postmodernism is irrelevant to their lives. When the reality of “postmodernism” is the mode of production, the mode of being, the entire “enframing” of our society. Just like medieval ideas were for medieval society. People are affected by postmodern ideas through any art, commodity, (art is commodity) or anything which was inspired by the culture of nihilism itself.

5 comments

I think, I find the above perspective illuminating and arresting. It begs the question, do postmodernist thinkers and writers have nothing to do with the postmodern reality/mind? And if they don’t what forces, thinkers or polemic created the post modern reality.?

For example, I am sure Voltaire and his supporters would have no problem crediting him with at least providing some impetus to the enlightenment movement. Generally, I thought it was accepted that revolutionary crowds throughout continental Europe in both 1789 and 1848 were inspired and quoting the thoughts a Voltaire, a Rousseau. Do you deny this connection?

Are you saying Postmodernist thinkers have had no influence and are merely a school of observation and revelation?

The Enlightenment, too, was an explosion in science and technologies. The book industry exploded. Calculus was invented. Physics, etc. At the same time people like Voltaire and Diderot reflected the culture’s values in their writings, and because of the material conditions of society, they were quoted by a new class of people who read their books. They were different from postmodernists because they praised the Enlightenment, they wanted to push the Enlightenment further — they believed that science was liberating humanity. They were pro-Enlightenment. They were revolutionaries.

Revolutionaries today quote postmodern thinkers. Foucault and Deleuze are quoted by so many philosophically minded revolutionaries today. But postmodernists do not praise the era the way Voltaire praised the Enlightenment. Postmodernists see postmodernism as still infected with the Enlightenment ideology. Postmodernists did not create the postmodern reality, only they helped create a resistance to it. If revolutionary crowds today are quoting postmodernists (which they are) they are denouncing this culture and (in Foucault’s vein) abolishing the prison system, and realizing their collective bio-powers, or in Baudrillard’s vein, telling people to turn off the bourgeois radios and televisions because “consciousness is born in the streets” (Greek communique, 2008), or they are in Deleuze’s vein, “becoming riot”.

I guess if they have affected society they have created a new intelligentsia which is more sophisticated in its analysis of capitalism and technology. But that’s only because capitalism itself has become more sophisticated in the production of technologies and its mass society.

I know this is pretty old, but I just stumbled across your site and was reading through it. I love your perspective on this. Taking it further, I feel like a lot of activists denounce postmodernism because they dismiss it as unnecessary intellectualism, or elitism, or something. I’ve recently detected a wave of anti-intellectualism, at least around where I’m from, and it’s becoming harder to defend theory at all. This is definitely understandable as a lot of postmodern theory can be interpreted as unnecessary drivel, but another thing that for some reason doesn’t click with a lot of people is that the language of the theorists reflect the very condition that they are analyzing. In fact, the first thing that drew me to postmodern theory (other than the fact that it is “current”, if you will) is that it almost takes on a life of its own, it’s very artistic and humanistic – NOT just bourgeois intellectualism that puts its own culture on a pedestal – it is reactionary, it exposes the institutions that need to be changed (and eventually eradicated). I like the way you said everything you said in this post, I’m definitely going to draw on your perspective when talking to people about it in the future! I guess I never even put two and two together for some reason – I hear myself saying “I love postmodern theory” but the reason I do to begin with (I now realize) is that it denounces everything that it analyzes. Anyway, I like a lot of what you say on here. Thanks!

Thank you very much! If you have a blog it would be nice to follow along.

I have been writing about postmodernism for four years and I have changed my views on it plenty of times. Now when I think of it, it’s not as if I am looking at a foreign set of ideas or theories. I think of postmodernism as the conditions of the present age. In other words Ive pretty much swallowed it up and eaten it whole.